Organisations are adopting digital technologies in two waves, with digital disruption affecting almost every one of them.
This is according to Wimpie Van Rensburg, country manager, Sub-Saharan Africa at Riverbed Technology, who says Riverbed's global customer base of over 27 000 organisations is adopting digital technologies in two major waves.
In the first wave over the last decade, there's been huge uptake of cloud, mobile, social and big data technologies, notes Van Rensburg.
"For example, 2014 was the first year that the majority of application workloads were processed in the cloud. That is a major paradigm shift, and we're already two years past that point."
This first wave of technologies has driven huge advances in business capabilities such as cost-efficiency, reach, flexibility, agility, productivity, and the all-important customer experience, to name a few, says Van Rensburg.
He says the next decade will see the next wave of new Dx technologies - including
The Internet of things (IOT), cognitive systems, robotics, 3D printing, and next-generation security, piled on top of the first wave.
"This will bring more technical complexities and infrastructure challenges along with the promise of exciting new business capabilities. This next wave of technologies will be orders of magnitude larger - and more complex - than the first. For example, it's been recently noted that, across all industry sectors, less than 14% of assets with an IP address are connected to the enterprise network."
Not only will all of these assets be connected over the next few years, but the number of assets that become networked, data-generating components of the IOT will expand exponentially as everything that can be censored, from machines to oil lines to livestock to furniture to food, will be censored, explained Van Rensburg.
"The challenge for each enterprise, as we've noted, is to absorb all these technologies and create an infrastructure that can deliver amazing digital services. But there's a fundamental mismatch between digital innovation and the legacy, hardware-bound infrastructure designed for the pre-cloud age."
To consumers, digital services can seem like magic, offering amazing experiences and capabilities that were unimaginable just a few years ago - but they're not magic, says Van Rensburg.
They're comprised of a sequence of IT operations involving hybrid applications, data from various sources, hybrid networks, and end-user devices, all of which must be linked into a living chain of interactions orchestrated across a global, hybrid environment, he adds. "This chain, like any chain, is only as strong as its weakest link."
As companies digitally transform, the application chains that make digital services possible are getting longer, more complex, more fragile, with far more weak links, because of the hybrid complexity, are far more difficult to find and fix, says Van Rensburg.
"Any glitch in any router, data store, software, network connection, server, called service, etc. along the way can slow the service down or even break it completely."
"Enterprises are realising that, just as Dx is a board-level business strategy, so too the infrastructure that supports it must be approached strategically. A tactical, piece-meal approach cannot solve the underlying infrastructure problems that cause the performance gap, cannot fully integrate Dx technologies with the business, and cannot deliver the required technical capabilities at scale," said Van Rensburg.
He said to safely transition from the old hardware-bound, router-heavy, labour-intensive infrastructure, enterprises need a new software-defined architecture that bridges the gap between business requirements and technical capabilities.
"The idea behind business-defined performance is to establish a common language (for communicating) and a common interface (for executing) for both business and IT teams, and thus to enable the direct translation of business intent into the execution of technical capabilities."
"We believe enterprises will increasingly understand and embrace the need for a strategic architecture to support digital transformation. Piece-part solution providers will struggle to solve these infrastructure challenges of the hybrid enterprise."
As a result, a small set of architecture providers will claim the lion's share of the market by offering enterprise-scale, digital-ready solutions, concludes Van Rensburg.
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